Grammar in Speech, in Speech
by dakeyras
Summary: Team 7 discusses the finer points of writing. Crack, but will make you a better author.


Team 7 were waiting for Kakashi to arrive and start training for the day. Since it wasn't the first, second or even tenth time this had happened, they'd almost run out of topics to discuss when Sakura hit upon an idea. "Today, you're going to learn how to punctuate your speech! You can tell it's me talking because of context clues from the sentence before, so I don't need to add anything else to this paragraph after I finish talking, although I can if I want to," she said.

"Hn. I don't need to add anything either because of the clues in my speech, but it's a good idea to not omit the speaker's name regularly, as it makes for confusing blocks of text."

Naruto rolled his eyes. Turning to his teammates, he added, "Hn. Since everyone knows it's me talking, I can make fun of Sasuke's verbal tics without confusing the reader as to who I am. Anyway, why is this important, Sakura?"

"That's easy!" Sasuke interjected. "Some people don't know how to format speech in text, and it leads to a confusing mess where anyone and everyone could be talking."

"He was asking me, you muppet," Sakura said, folding her arms. "Besides, that's not all. There's more to good speech than just saying who's talking. Nobody even knows where we are, who we're facing, or anything like that at all! There's a different tone if we're all sat on the same bench, compared to me dangling my feet in the stream, Sasuke leaning against a tree with his hands in his pockets, and Naruto trying to catch tadpoles in the shallows. Speech is part of the story, and you can't isolate it easily, although a lot of fanfiction authors who're writing about a manga or anime tend to forget that the reader can't see what's happening, so they need a different style of writing to the source material.

"But back to more technical matters. I think that there should be a new paragraph here, since I'm changing the subject, just like paragraphs work outside of speech. But you need to pay attention to the speech marks! I didn't close them when I ended my first paragraph, but I used another opening pair at the start of the second. It looks weird, but it's actually correct." She kicked up a few drops of water, watching them sparkle in the sunlight. "And don't either of you dare say anything until the next paragraph starts. Don't you know that it's frightfully rude, not to mention _grammatically incorrect_ to talk in the same paragraph as someone else?" she added, before continuing, "you should both pay close attention to what you say."

Naruto jumped to his feet triumphantly. "Hah, I've got you now - you just interrupted your speech twice in the same paragraph, and it looks weird. Even I know that! You should add another paragraph break instead, like you just told me about."

"He has a point, you know. Besides, it was clear who's talking, so why would you even add that extra bit? If it's unambiguous who the speaker is, there's no need and often no point to adding a name. Notice, also, how you can tell that there's a new speaker and not just a Naruto with multiple personalities, by the fact that Naruto's paragraph ended with closed speech marks and mine starts with new open ones? It's why it's so important to not close them when it's the same person talking for several paragraphs at a time, although I'm not sure why I need to know that - I don't talk enough for it to matter." Sasuke decided to add his name to his speech anyway, just because in this case it wouldn't matter and it made the long body of text look cleaner. However, he refused to add a 'he said' - too many of them would make him look boring, and not cool and brooding at all!

"By the way," Sakura said, trying to move on from her mistake, "what happens if I have a non-standard ending to a sentence, right before 'Sakura said' would be added? I don't want to have to use commas all the time."

"That's a tough one," Naruto said. "You could always just move the 'Sakura said' part so it's after a place where there's a full stop, since that's changed to a comma automatically, and then use punctuation elsewhere?"

"I've got it!" Sakura shouted. "If it's not a period, then it stays the same! Whether exclamation mark or question mark, I can just use it as I would normally. It's only periods that are prohibited just before 'I said'."

Sasuke threw a small stone at Naruto, bouncing it off the back of his head. "Grow up and stop laughing every time Sakura says period. It's a very important piece of punctuation, and most of your sentences should end in it. If you use too many exclamation marks, you sound loud and hyperactive, and too many question marks make you sound very unsure of yourself. It can work in small blocks of text to highlight your character, but do it regularly and it's incredibly annoying."

"I can do what I want! I'm going to use as many exclamation marks as I want, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!" Naruto mumbled. "Oh shit, I should have used shouted there, right? 'Said' is good, but when I deviate from it it'd better be for a damn good reason."

At that moment, Kakashi showed up. "You're late!" all three of his students yelled. He mumbled an excuse, realising that he could avoid going to the effort of a paragraph break if he mentioned his speech in a way that didn't require any speech marks. He bit back a curse when he realised it was in vain - he needed at least one paragraph in order to explain the lesson anyway, unless he ended the chapter here and then started the next chapter after training was over. Truly, the greatest skill a ninja could learn was meta-no-jutsu.


End file.
